June 26, 2011

Overheating

Hopefully I’ve solved my overheating problems with the lenovo. First using the nvidia blob seems to have lowered the gpu temperature, but it wasn’t enough. Turning off the “discrete graphics” and trying to run the thing with the Intel GPU led to scary kernel crashes. I’ve realized that cpufreq does not take into account cpu temperature (that’s kind of dumb isn’t it). The few posts I found had solutions of the form “cpus should never overheat” and “reapply thermal paste” … yeah that’s very useful. My acpi does not output temperature for some reason, though lm_sensors seem to be working, so it seems cpuspeed daemon won’t work I guess. So it’s either hacking cpuspeed or the simpler solution just lowering the maximum speed of the cpu. That seems to be working beautifully. I tried very hard to overheat it and it’s still good. I can’t really tell that it’s slower so I don’t really care.

Still I hoped this would have been solved long ago. I sort of assumed it was actually.

Before I managed to “fix it,” I have come up against the “run fsck manually” message, which I filed as a bug against fedora only to get “what did that look like and that shouldn’t happen nowdays” response. Well I am not about to replicate this as I actually need to … you know … do work. And I don’t want to end up spending the day reinstalling the computer in case the filesystem really does get hosed.

Anyway, not too happy with the Lenovo anymore. There are plenty of problems with this hardware. Given how much everyone was raving about lenovo, I expected a lot better. Next time (which given how this hardware seems to be working is going to be soon) i will buy another one of those linux preinstalled laptops. The hardware will suck, but at least I won’t have to buy windows.

I wish I could buy a laptop and have it for years. That doesn’t seem to be a possibility. First you buy a laptop and must install a bleeding edge distro to get all the hardware to work. Then by the time the version of the distro you use is reasonably mature and bug free (or you can use a different long term supported kind of distro) then your hardware breaks down, forcing you to buy a new laptop. The cycle of life!

I wish people built things that meant to last for more than 1-2 years.

Like this:

Related

Apple builds laptops that last: in my experience 5+ year lifespans are normal. In fact, I’ve never seen an Apple laptop die, even after suffering accidents such as drops (my wife’s) and liquid spills (a Powerbook G4 that I sold to a relative after years of service. It still runs).

Mine have suffered only minor drops and no liquid spills, but have endured constant travel for years without a problem.

The build quality and durability of a solid metal body Macbook is simply outstanding.